Whether or not the unprecedented UK success of Pitchfork fave "Crazy" indicates some sort of digital guard-change, Gnarls Barkley remain shaded in a bit of mystery. Arriving via a cryptic web site that blared "Crazy" and featured only an illustration of a speaker, Gnarls Barkley at first seemed more curio than hitmaker. That has certainly changed, which is no surprise considering the members of Gnarls are the soft-spoken, bookish Danger Mouse, the cagey producer behind The Grey Album and Gorillaz's Demon Days (not to mention work for underground hip-hop artists like Prince Po and his partner Jemini), and the gregarious Cee-Lo, a legend in the South thanks to his work with the seminal Goodie Mob and two acclaimed solo albums, Cee-Lo Green and His Perfect Imperfections and Cee-Lo Green Is the Soul Machine. The two recently teamed to record St. Elsewhere, a dark and tuneful album that may or may not be winking with a teardrop. Pitchfork spoke to the two of them recently in New York City about the release of their debut album, the Violet Femmes, and how to create 21st century psych-pop.

Pitchfork: Can you explain the shtick behind the Gnarls Barkley persona?

Danger Mouse: It's a little simpler than people think. It's not so much a Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse record as the two of us together being something else. There was kind of a different thing going on with us as we were doing this record. The combination of the two of us made [it] something other than just the obvious. So we gave it a name, and that's what it was.

Pitchfork: What about the root of the name aside from the obvious Charles Barkley allusion?

DM: We're not getting into the whole big thing on the name. It's just a name that we liked. It's a name and that's it. There's not really some big thing to it. It's like asking Cee-Lo why is he named Cee-Lo. It just made its way into being.

Pitchfork: It seems like you guys are trying to create an air of mystery around the project.

CL: Not create one. Maintain one. The mystery just is; it's still mysterious to us as well.

DM: We definitely weren't trying to hide anything. We started this record more than two years ago and at this point maybe it sounds like this super-big collaboration. But it was never really to be this big thing with this big song. We did most of the record without a label. We were just doing stuff. There wasn't this thing to really promote because we were seeing how the record was turning out as we were going along. We didn't know people would care that much. We didn't make an effort to go, "Hey, aren't we cool? Isn't this great?" We just did it.

I can see what you're saying because people are mentioning it now. But me and him aren't sitting around going, "Oh we're gonna do this, oh we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that." It just unfolded the same way the record did. It took two-and-a-half years, and the way it's unfolding is taking its time as well.

Pitchfork: Well, the web site appeared out of nowhere, and "Crazy" never got a 12" release.

DM: There is one now, but it leaked so there was nothing we could really do about it.

Pitchfork: So how did you first hook up?

CL: My services were rendered. [Laughs] To do a remix for "Ghetto Pop Life" by Danger Mouse and Jemini. And after our work was concluded, he asked whether he could play a couple of things for me. I was like, "Cool" and I was blown away by the four or five or six tracks. It's very rare that you get someone to just bust off six things that make you say, "Wow." I said we should hook up after that and do a few tracks. And he was like, "Well, I don't really do tracks."

DM: In the back of mind I was like, "Do I say that?" because I was thinking it, but I was like am I really gonna say that?

C: He said, "I don't do tracks, I do albumsÉ" [Laughs]

DM: And then I said, "OK, sure sure."

C: We did those six tracks, but it ended up taking two years going back and forth.

DM: That was 2003, maybe September or October, and then we did our first demo, "Storm Coming", which is different from what you hear on the record. And then his new record (Cee-Lo Green Is the Soul Machine) came out and I did The Grey Album so we got kind of busy. It came about naturally, sending things back and forth, and we recorded a bunch of it together in Atlanta as well. So as we were going along, we weren't really rushing. There was no label or anything like that, we were just seeing how it was going.

Pitchfork: How many of the six tracks you first heard actually made it through the process?

DM: Two, "Storm Coming" and "Just a Thought".

Pitchfork: What were they like?

DM: Really raw. They actually turned out basically the same. "Necromancer" was on there too.

DM: They were three of the original five or six, and then luckily it took a while after that because I had to get better over the years. The last few years I've gotten better. I've had ideas, but how the hell do you execute them when you have no idea what you're doing? It took a couple of years to start to kind of see what I was doing and then the tracks I was sending were getting, I think, getting a little more focused, a little better, but still having that kind of chaotic thing I was looking for. It was like you couldn't really have somebody rapping over and it doesn't really matter what tempo I had to find a way of attacking it that I be kind of blown away by.

Pitchfork: Was it you or Jemini that wanted to Cee-Lo on the" Ghetto Pop Life" remix?

DM: Both. Jemini was definitely a fan, and I was a big fan myself. [Cee-Lo] and I had a common friend, Trey, out of London, who suggested him. We talked and hooked up in Atlanta. I was there visiting family-- most of my family's in Atlanta-- so we came there and tried out the remix. He did his thing. I started playing tracks to see if he liked it.

Pitchfork: Is that how you guys recorded the album, together? Or would you send him tracks?

DM: A little more than half we did together, and then there were probably five or so that were back and forth that I sent the stuff and he was like, "Oh I put something down to this the other day," and he sent it to me and we kind of finished putting it all together.

C: YEAH!

Pitchfork: Do you prefer being in the studio with a producer or recording the tracks on your own and messing around with it?

C: Either way is fine. There wasn't necessarily a preference. I think we were just trying to be time-conscious once the process started to speed up a bit. A part of inspiration was just to shock Danger. I like to surprise him with something, so that was my drive. But then again, I also embraced his opinion, so either way was fine.

DM: Turned out to be a good mix. That's what we wanted to get done at the end of the day.

Pitchfork: Were you writing these songs at the same time as the Soul Machine songsÉor was this all after?

C: All after.

Pitchfork: So, how did you guys go about getting signed-- it sounds like you started doing it as a pet project. Did you go and shop the single or wait until you had the record done?

DM: No, naw. We had a couple songs, and then we had this one session in Atlanta for a few weeks and got the rest, the bulk of it, "Go Go Gadget" and "Crazy", you know. We had five or six songs, then we passed it over the managers to see if anybody was into it. And it took time. Stuff got passed around. That's how it got leaked. It's bound to happen, you know.

But we're fortunate that people wanted to hear it.

Pitchfork: It contributed to the anticipation of the record a lot. I know I was excited when I first heard it, and if it hadn't leaked, I wouldn't have known about it as soon as I did.

DM: I guess that's one way to look at it.

C: I guess the early leak caused us to be conscious of this. Being organic about it, free form, and carefree like we wereÉmaybe that created a little pressure. I wanted the record to be out of control though, I didn't care.

DM: That's the thing. It never dawned on us that we were going to have a song or two that was going to jump out. I was trying to impress him with the tracks, trying to make them really crazy-- something he would really be into so he would tell people I was good. And then he's like trying to come back with, "You think you're good and on some other shit, how about this?" So I Ôm trying to out-crazy him. I never thought there was going to be a song in there that would connect so quickly with people. The record as a whole takes a little while to get into because there's a language. You really gotta get used to it before the melodies creep up on you.

Pitchfork: The album is really high energy and there's a lot of stuff going on, but it also seems really sad. There are a lot of melancholy tracks on it, lyrically at least. Where are you coming from with itÉor are you just messing around with everybody?

DM: I guess that's a good takeÉI never thought about it that way.

C: I guess I'm kind of messing around a little bit, just trying to really charter some new territory as far my writing. Ultimately, I am a writer and the production compelled me. It was just the perfect excuse for me to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and have a good time. Actually, I wasn't trying to be sad. "Just a Thought" for example, to end that record by saying "Ébut I'm fine," all I was saying was that suicide is just a thought. It comes from a very simple place and I'm assuming that almost everyone has thought about it once or twice, even in passing.

Pitchfork: Are all the songs written from personal experience or do you feel like you're assuming a persona?

C: A great deal of it is personal. But the persona is, I guess, the out of body experience that takes place. Because I'm not conscious of what the outcome is going to be, I'm only conscious of my intentions, do you know what I'm saying? And even my intentions were simple initially. I'm looking through the window of the vocal booth, trying to see how Danger's gonna react to it. So a lot of it just came from that.

DM: I used to hide; so he wouldn't see my reactions. Like, I didn't want to affect anything. Because if something's going really well you don't want to do anything to jinx it or to change it up.

C: And I know that Danger is very critical as opposed to my free form, but if I saw a nod or a smile or a smirk I knew we were onto something. The mood was just lightning. It's all good, clean fun.

Pitchfork: You're messing with my perception of what I thought the record was like.

DM: For most of songs, the first time we went in to record we just talked for two or three hours. We were in the studio, we had the time booked, we didn't know each other that well, and we just talked the whole time. It was a way [of] getting to know each other. A lot of the stuff in [songs like] "Just a Thought", "Crazy", "Necromancer" came about that way.

Musically, I come from a darker thing-- that's just what interests me. Melancholy is the best way to describe it, because I [also] love melody. But I try to bring darker texture to it-- a visual, cinematic thing. I would give him a bunch of tracks and he was like, "I like this one." I just said, "Cool, glad you like it" and it would be on repeat for like three or four hours and he would go in the booth and try the stuff out. You're hearing what the effect of that was.

C: A lot of it was just one take?

DM: Yeah, "Crazy" was one take, that was it. The first time he did that, he went out of body. I work with a lot of singers; one thing that always screws stuff up is trying to emulate a performance, but the first time you're plucking at a guitar, when you're coming up with it and it comes out, that's the only time it's real. "Crazy" was out the first time it came out of his mouth; it's like he sang it on the mic and that's why it sounds the way it does, I think. I remember afterward he was like, "What do you think of that, how was that" and I was like "Ohhh, that was alrightÉ" [Laughs]

Pitchfork: It seems like you guys have kind of an interesting chemistry. With the other people you've worked with, like Gemini or Goodie Mob would you be trying one up each other or is that unique to you guys?

DM: No, definitely not. I don't think its was competing as much as trying to impress him. I'm a fan, and I'm trying to continue to make him proud he's working with me.

C: He more than impressed me-- he challenged me. This is a chapter in my career of which I'm proud. But even though it's present, I'm still looking at it in retrospectÉas it's happening. That's my first good quote. [Laughs]

Pitchfork: You mentioned something about getting better Brian: What do you mean, technically. What does that mean?

C: I noticed that too!

Pitchfork: What did you see that you didn't think was up to snuff?

DM: All I do is listen to music. It's a weird thing. It's like I have so much catching up to do. I've always been over my head. That's just the way I work best, you know. Like when you're studying for school you think, "I can only study when I have to study the night before." That kind of means you're lazy or you're a procrastinator, but for me with music it's a similar thing. It's like I've been over my head for most of my career so to speak.

Pitchfork: Doesn't that seem sort of modest though?

DM: No. I've done a lot of stuff recently, so I'm realizing that the ideas are there. I've got a ton of ideas, it's just execution. It's cute when I look back at older stuff and see what I'm trying to do, but I had no idea how to get there. When I look at songs and I'm like, "Where we at, what time is it? Is it past 2 minutes 15 seconds, then that's the song then." It's like, how many bars, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, middle 8 or whatever. I'm always looking at the clock because if it's enjoyable for more than 2 minutes and 10 seconds then that's the song to me. If I've made it that far without making an ass of myself or whomever I'm working with, then we've done a fucking song. So that's kind of the way I've controlled it up to this point.

[I've had] two more years of listening to music and working with people like Cee-Lo, Damon [Albarn], MF Doom. I've learned a lot more about how to do what I'm doing. I understand a little bit more about what I'm trying to do, [but] I wanna get back in over my head again to see what happens.

Pitchfork: You mentioned that 2:15 mark. A lot of the songs on the Gnarls record are pretty short.

DM: No fuck it, that's it. I remember we'd say, "That's a track, that's a track!" "Go Go Gadget Gospel"-- it's one of my favorite songs. It's a great track, but I was like, "Man it's only 1:57, let's work out a little intro, we'll do this other thing and make it the first song." We didn't force it-- we could've had somebody come rap or done something else-- but it's tight the way it is. Mission accomplished.

C: I wrote to a lot of the demos as they were sent to me. They were just snippets.

DM: It's quirky, but now I'm more confident. Because it was me telling myself, "Why are you doing that? You know you can just loop it up and do it as long as you want?" But some of the stuff I sent I was self-conscious about; I was like, "Man, I don't wanna put more than :58 of track on here because you're gonna get bored of it." So I'd only give it a minute-and-a-half or something and then he would send me back a minute-and-a-half, and I was like how am I going to make this into a song?

C: But I knew it was possible. If I can quote one of my influences, Sly Stone. If you took Sly out of the equation, they were still groovin'. The truly dynamic thing about them is they were a live set-up and the songs were all about two minutes long.

DM: I'm way into the two-minute thing. There's just less pressure really. I don't think there are enough songs like that personally.

Pitchfork: You're singing almost the entire record, there's very little rapping on it, why is that? Is that something you guys talked about?

C: Well again, to MC for me is more contrived. With melody, the possibilities are much more infinite and that's something you can bend or shape or twist and stretch, and the harmonies are different. So in that situation I prefer to do that. I feel like I'm really accomplishing something with harmony and melody. Ultimately, again, I'm not a singer, some people can sing with an "I" or an "a," some people can sing and they can sang. I think I can "sang" more than anything. I'm not a formal singer and I'm an MC, but it's secondary to the second nature of just melody. You know but ultimately I'm a writer and I do soul music. Whether it's in song form or rhyme scheme, it's soul.

DM: I love what you said in the beginning, because I didn't know. That was the whole point for meÉ

C: I couldn't rap over any of that stuff!

DM: I work with rappers a lot, but that wasn't the way I looked at it. I remember we were in the studio and he said something about rap. I wasn't going to ask him, "Are you going to rap?" or "Come on please rap," but I remember him saying something like, "I wouldn't even know how to rap these days, what am I supposed to do, "De de de dede?" Where would you even start-- none of the tracks I gave him lent themselves [to that]. I couldn't picture him doing it anyway. He said he was going to react to them however they made him react-- and most of that was singing.

C: I still got it though, just not for this album.

Pitchfork: Both of you are identified typically as hip-hop figures, but a lot of your most recent projects are not hip-hop based. Is there a reason for that?

C: I think the Gorillaz album has a more hip-hop attitude and attack compared to everything in its genre. It still could be classified as hip-hop.

Pitchfork: I meant not to say not that there's no rapping on it and not that the attitude is absent, but if you look in the rack at the record store it's going to be in the rock section.

DM: Right, right. I only wanted to make music when I realized that you didn't have to just do hip-hop, because that was all I knew. I wasn't trained in any instrument. So when I first started making tracks and getting instruments and stuff like that, the things that made me wanna actually make the music itself was not hip-hop.

I guess it's weird. I was probably 19 before I can even remember hearing a Beatles song for the first time. To hear a Beatles record for the first time at 19, after all the music you've heard in your life; to hear that does something, it kind of resets certain things. I did come up listening to a lot of different music-- a lot of hip-hop and Miami-based stuff since the time [I was] 12; hair-metal and pop music when I was younger. That's not stuff I sought out-- it's just was what was around.

C: It was stuff you couldn't miss. Who doesn't know something like "We're Not Gonna Take It?" Everybody knows that record.

DM: A song like "Gone Daddy Gone," there's a couple ways you can look at it. I can see people liking it or disliking it for very different reasons. I had that tape a long time ago. I had gotten it from a friend when I was young and listened to it, didn't even know what band it was or anything like that and really liked it. And then the idea was-- Cee-Lo, I know you've probably heard "Blister in the Sun"-- but he hadn't heard "Gone Daddy Gone", so it was like, [put in] a different context, to see what would happen. We just put down the whole backing track down-- I always liked that little xylophone line. That wasn't for people who loved "Gone Daddy Gone". If you love "Gone Daddy Gone", then listen to "Gone Daddy Gone." It was for people who would like some of the spirit of a song they hadn't heard before-- music that wasn't intentionally made for me. When we make a record we aren't necessarily making it for people who are going to be 12 years old 30 years from now; we're making it for those who are 12 now. So it's not intended to be a better version for people who liked the original.

Pitchfork: You hadn't heard the song before?

C: No.

Pitchfork: And he just played it for you and you thought "I'm with it."

C: It was simple enough to do. I always used to call "Blister in the Sun" "Raisin in the sun," but whatever. [Laughs] I didn't get up on Violent Femmes until "Breaking Up".

I was open to any suggestions that Danger had, and of course he had produced the music which ended up being story of my life so to speak. Trust wasn't an issue. Just do it, I don't care.

Pitchfork: What's the live show gonna look like? Are you going to have a band or a DJ?

Both: Yeah, Yeah.

DM: We're still putting it together, but it's a complex task and we're taking it very seriously. We did the album and didn't think many people would want to come and see it. It's definitely a studio album. But now we have this new task that we have to settle pretty soon: How do we take this live? So there's a lot being put into that, and I'd rather not say this or that because we don't really know. Is it going to be live sounding? Hopefully not, because that would be boring. So we're working on the visuals, working on a lot of stuff, but we just don't know exactly what it's going to look or sound like yet. We're just as curious as you really.

C: I just need to look handsome and show up.

DM: Not that hard.

Pitchfork: How much of the record was recorded with live instrumentation?

DM: There's live instrumentation on virtually every song there-- and a lot of samples all over the place. I was trying to make a psychedelic record-- a new psychedelic record-- and that's why when he did the layered vocal stuff it had to be weird without even having to say it. Like on the song "St. Elsewhere", the background stuff really worked with the texture of it. But I wanted to try to do it in a way without using a band, to make a new psychedelic record without using a band.

Mostly what I've been listening to for the past three or four years is 1960s, early 70s psych stuff-- the ones with the really crappy singers that just did it in their garages. It's the approach. I love the idea-- that was probably my favorite overall genre. It had the pop in it because they were all copying the Beatles, but it had experimentation because they were all trying to outdo each other with how crazy and how weird they could be. That's what I was trying to do. I didn't want anything to sound like you knew what was coming next.

Pitchfork: So Cee-Lo, what's up with Goodie Mob?

C: Goodie Mob are reunited and it feels so good. We actually have a couple new songs that we've done-- all four of us. It's cool man. It was cool to realize it was never broken, and [still] pretty interesting after so long. So you can look forward to that sometime in the future. It doesn't have a home just yet.

Pitchfork: You guys are without a label at the moment?

C: Yeah. You hear that don'tcha labels?

Pitchfork: I'm sure they're itching. I know you have the Jazze Pha album coming.

C: Yeah, Jazze Pha album Happy Hour on Sho Nuff/Capitol Records, he's a good friend of mine, that's a solid project that's completely different from this one.

Pitchfork: I heard some of those records, definitely different.

C: So I'm having fun right now, because I don't have a formal solo deal. I'm a free agent lying around, planting my flag here and there. Which is something I've always wanted to do. I can put albums out in their appropriate places and they can be heard simultaneously.

Pitchfork: What about you Brian?

DM: Me and Jemini are pretty much done with another record. We worked on it for a while right after Ghetto Pop Life-- I gotta mix it. We basically have a whole other record that's there, we just gotta finish it. There's a lot of material recorded and it sounds really good. Jemini sounds amazing on it. He's really stepped it up.

Pitchfork: Anything else in the future?

DM: Yeah. I just finished a record with Damon [Albarn].

Pitchfork: For a Gorillaz project?

DM: No, it's not Gorillaz, it's not Blur-- it's a whole other thing. But it's taking another year. I just came back from there yesterday, mixing, it's really great. He's one of my biggest influences musically, and it turned out really good. So I'm doing that and working on some songs with the Rapture.

Pitchfork: So you guys think that you'll do another one of these?

DM: Yeah, we're already started some new tracks.

C: Yeah I want to get on this new track I heard from him.

Pitchfork: You're calling dibs on stuff already?

DM: I wanna get another record done before this one really takes off-- before the summer's over so we don't have to worry about what will people want next from us.